As the use of computers and the Internet have proliferated, so too has the use of email or downloading through a network. Many businesses and consumers use email as a prominent means of communication. Not surprisingly, the exponential growth of the medium has also attracted the interest of commercial email advertisers. Commercial email advertisers obtain email addresses from a variety of sources, for example, from email vendors, or from commercial web sites, often without the permission of the owners of the email addresses. The email addresses may then be used to promote the products and services of the commercial email advertisers, or of the parties they represent.
The result is a deluge of unsolicited email received by hapless email users. One method to deal with unsolicited email is for a user to manually select and delete the unsolicited email. Other methods provide for recognizing a message sent in bulk to multiple recipients, and to either discard or tag the message as a possible unsolicited message. Still other methods maintain a database of addresses of known senders of unsolicited email and on receipt of the email, automatically discard those received from the known senders of unsolicited email. Still other methods use key-word filters. This method provides for scanning the subject and/or the body of the email message for some pre-determined keywords, and if detected, the message may be either discarded or tagged as suspicious.
Despite the methods described above, commercial email advertisers use ingenious methods to frustrate the efforts of email recipients. For example, to defeat the detection of bulk email, the email messages may be routed through a maze of servers so that ultimately, the message does not appear to be a bulk emailing. To defeat a system that tracks the address of known senders of unsolicited messages, the originating address of the unsolicited email may be changed often. To confuse keyword filter methods, the subject field of the email may be deceitfully titled, for example, “In response to your query”. Moreover, the key-word filtering method suffers from other significant problems, for example, when trying to filter out email messages from pornographic email advertisers using the word “sex”, legitimate emails that include the word “sex” (e.g. emails relating to medical or biological science) may also be eliminated.
Commercial email advertisers also use methods to verify that an email address is valid. One such method uses a “web beacon” which is a link to a remote server operated or controlled by the commercial email advertiser. The link is often a URL which includes the user's email address or a representation of that address. This link is often activated merely by rendering the email for display on a display device. Thus, if the user opens the email document (allowing it to be viewed), as the email is being rendered the link will be activated, causing a call back, through the URL containing the user's email address (or representation of that address), to the remote server. Upon receiving the call back, the remote server will make a record showing that the user's email address is valid and will transmit the data (e.g. an image) which is associated with the link back to the user's system. This often happens without the user realizing that his/her email address has been sent out (or confirmed as valid) to a commercial email advertiser. This can also happen when a user selects (e.g. “clicks”) on an icon representing an unrendered image which causes a URL (containing the user's email address) to be sent to a remote server.
In addition, as “eCommerce” is getting more popular, more and more people are using the Internet to purchase goods, such as upgrading software, which may be downloaded over the Internet. However, the downloaded contents may also include viruses or Web beacons that may invade the privacy of a user. A typical way to prevent viruses is to use a virus scanning software to scan the contents downloaded. However, such virus scanning can only be performed after downloading the item. Furthermore, such virus scanning can only be performed based on a predetermined virus pattern, instead of personal information of a user.